


Ecce Cor Meum

by Painless_papercuts



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Grief, Post-Reichenbach, fairly angsty, hints at depression, obituary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 03:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Painless_papercuts/pseuds/Painless_papercuts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Ecce Cor Meum' - 'Behold My Heart'</p><p>When packing up to leave 221B Baker Street, John finds Sherlock's self-written obituary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ecce Cor Meum

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed. Any (constructive) criticism welcome, as it's probably quite OOC and cliché.
> 
> Based on 'An Obituary', a short story by Simon Armitage.

Packing up 221B Baker Street takes longer than expected. Sherlock had accumulated so much... paraphernalia, John’s refuses to say ‘junk’, during his time there. Most of Sherlock’s research papers had had to be bundled up and driven to the nearest dump. John had quietly and efficiently thrown them into the recycling, trying not to think of the implications, keeping his head down as unwelcome tears blurred his vision. He held the last paper in his hands, the Bee World journal that had been released the same month as Sherlock’s death. John slipped it inside his coat as he straightened himself up, squared his shoulders and left without looking back.

The only possession left now was his ‘friend’ on the mantelpiece. Leaning his cane against the fireplace, John carefully takes it down and looks at it. He had been its replacement, but could it replace Sherlock? Christ.

John takes a sheet of last week’s Guardian and wipes the skull down with it. As he wraps the skull up, a folded sheet of paper pokes out of the base, the Foramen Magnum, John notes. His hand stops trembling when he unfolds it.

 

 

‘As a child, Sherlock Holmes singled himself out to be an extraordinary example of the human species. Preferring to study anatomy whilst his peers chose the inane, historically incorrect Cowboys and Indians, Sherlock was endowed with great intellect from a very young age. His knowledge of this fact earned him very few friends. Throughout school, Sherlock chose to excel at the Sciences and studied Chemistry at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge as a young adult. Awake and asleep, he walked the earth’s battlements alone, treating offered friendship with suspicion, systematically beating, until dead, the first flames of pathetic tenderness or the sparks of love.

As the world’s only consulting detective, the role itself invented by its creator, Sherlock enjoyed an illustrious career, solving crimes ranging from the idiotically simple to the quite interesting. Many crimes unsolved by the incompetent Metropolitan Police were unravelled. Idiots

But right from the very beginning there was a gnawing emptiness in Sherlock’s life. The more he tried to fill it with questionably legal substances and cold cases, the greater and deeper it grew. Then one Dr John Watson limped in and, within 24 hours, filled this void. Providing a source of entertainment, experimentation and insight, John brought to Sherlock’s life what all had so far failed to do; he brought purpose. They complemented each other suitably well, Sherlock bringing danger and excitement to John’s life, John bringing purpose and, more importantly, a gun to Sherlock’s. In the few years that they knew each other, their relationship grew from strength to strength, to heights others could not even dream of. John was the only and most important audience to ~~my~~  Sherlock’s genius. While not the most luminous of people, plain, short and foulmouthed, John became an unbeatable conductor of Sherlock’s light. Sherlock never had friends, but he found one in the form of John Watson.

When Sherlock Holmes jumped from the roof of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, he left no written note, only one which was spoken to John Watson. It is with deep regret that Sherlock was not able to explain his actions to John; the only one who could claim to understand the man that was Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes was a great man, and John Watson made him a good one.’

 

 

John folds the piece of paper back up, clutching it in his fist as he makes his way into the kitchen. On the table lies Sherlock’s greatcoat, slumped forward on the wooden surface, engulfing John as he picks it up. The huge, sweeping, overburdening coat with its thick heavy cloth, and its great sodding collar turned down, and its mineshaft pockets, and the blood encrusted on its shoulder. Through the button holes, daylight looks distant and pinched, like the world looks to an astronaut, unattached to his spacecraft, floating slowly, uncontrollably away from all he ever knew. And there on the kitchen tiles John weeps, curled up in a ball next to the sink, draped in the coat. Written at the bottom of, in the too familiar sweeping scrawl,

 

_'Believe in me, John'._


End file.
